Snowden was a Spy, after all

So, after this past weekend's news shows, we have the Mike Rogers, from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, confirming that Snowden was a spy, after all, and probably had help from the FSB.  The KGB, predecessor to the FSB, was Putin's home before he came to office.  The news media calls this a "revelation", which only means they hadn't even thought about it before theses two stated the obvious.

As I have been saying for months now, Snowden didn't act like a guy who saw something on his computer that he didn't like, and defected because he wanted to help us get to be a better country.  Rogers says he looked for things that were not privacy related, and seem to be those kinds of things that could only undermine the intelligence collection capabilities of the United States.  It looks like the Russians were helping him, or at least, that is being investigated as a possibility.

This wouldn't be the first time the Russians have helped a U.S. person steal classified information.  Up until Snowden, Walker was the worst, having given over the crypto keys that were used to encrypt hundreds of thousands of exchanges.  Manning made that easier by publishing the ones he had.  They didn't even have to be decrypted.

This is a new way to spy, and I have to say, we ought to credit the Russians for their novel and successful way of going about it.  It was a pretty smart way of covering their tracks while they stole everything they possibly could.  The spy even admits he did it, gets the press to cover him in the publication of the information he steals, and nobody even looks Russia's way for months.  If someone from the FSB was helping him, you can bet that person is not around for the investigation.

Snowden's case has taught us some valuable lessons about contractor security clearances, internal security of our computer networks, and how to use the press to cover spying operations.  The Russians have apparently managed to use our own system against us - again.  Don't we ever learn that we have procedures to keep these kinds of things from happening again?  Instead we have OPM running the security clearance process, and bumbling again and again, to the point that clearances are a mess.  OPM's incompetence is starting to affect people in jobs that require a security clearance.  We have thousands of people in limbo, waiting for OPM action.  They can't get jobs until that happens.  I met with 3 over the weekend and all were waiting, without salary, until OPM finished an update.  The jobs come and go and they wait.

Our internal computer security, cited over and over again by GAO, is not getting any better.  Our laws can't stop the press from releasing anything Snowden gives them.   While the President debates what metadata the NSA can keep under what circumstances, the Russians must be laughing at us.  We aren't even addressing the kinds of things that Snowden represents.  Amazon books: